Sketching a Friend Sketching

I've been working on this the last couple of days after receiving a picture from a dear friend here where I live and who's part of our sketching group.

He and his wife made a trip to India and while there, shared a few photos..........one of which was him doing what he loves doing..............sketching.

As soon as I saw the photo, it just called out to be sketched.  It was late at night when I started it by sketching with an HB pencil on Stonehenge 90 lb paper.

The next day I had a hard time deciding on what medium I wanted to use........pen and ink with watercolor, color pencil (watercolor pencil dry), pen and ink only, or graphite.  I did the next best thing..............saving the original pencil sketch on paper for watercolor, I scanned the pencil sketch and uploaded to my Ipad.  Using Procreate (sketching App), I can work this in multiple ways emulating the other mediums.

I started out using the pencil tool 6B using color rather than just black, which has a really nice texture looking like color pencil.  I left the top area behind his head for writing a paragraph about Lee being in India.  At first I just wanted to color Lee sketching rather than adding anything more to the background.

After I worked the color version and debating on if I wanted to take it further with color, I worked him again in pen and ink only using the Fine and Technical pen tools.  I decided I didn't want to add any description to this one.  For me this was great practice with hatching and cross hatching.

Once I was finished with the pen and ink sketch, I decided to go back to the color version and finish the rest off in color.

At first I had written out above his head about his trip but didn't care for how it looked so I erased it.  I chose to keep the area behind his head plain with no structural detail and only a short single line description of who this is.  I also darkened his hat since I added color behind him and the hat appeared to get somewhat lost even with the light wall shading.  The wall and ground were done using the charcoal pencil tool.

Eventually, I will work the original pencil sketch using pen and ink plus watercolor giving me several different versions that took care of my indecisiveness about what medium I wanted to use or the look I was hoping for.  :-)